Three Years of Waste Expected to Fill Fort McMurray Landfill in Six Months

Piles of fridges and freezers collected from Slave Lake, Alta., are stacked in the landfill on Thursday, June 16 2011. The appliances on the left were emptied of their rotten contents and ready to be crushed. The pile on the right still needs to be cleared. Amber Bracken/Edmonton Sun/Postmedia Network

Days after much of Abasand was reduced to ash, bulldozers were busy knocking down the remaining frames of destroyed homes along Athabasca Avenue. The rubble would form one pile of thousands in the coming weeks.

The municipality expects the landfill south of Fort McMurray will take in 771,000 tonnes of waste during the next six months, three times what it handles in a year. It is enough raw material to fill the CN tower six-and-a-half times. It is more waste than the Edmonton Waste Management Centre processed in 2014. It will take at least 40,471 truckloads to haul out of the city.

“The clearing and disposal is going to be an immense operation. But it will be done,” says Tom Moore, who manages Slave Lake’s landfill.